You may have read about a recent study that linked taking a daily multivitamin to elevating a woman's risk of breast cancer, and been rightly concerned about it. From all appearances, it's certainly appears far more credible than the very recent Reader's Digest piece that slammed the need for anyone to take a supplement too. I suspect you won't be as concerned, however, after taking a closer look at the numbers.
For the record, researchers tracked the health of more than 35,000 Swedish women (ages 49-83) and their use of multivitamins to "prevent chronic diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular disease" for a decade. Roughly 25 percent of the 35,000 patients who participated in the study (9,017) took a multivitamin, while the rest didn't.
Of the 974 patients who were diagnosed with breast cancer, the majority (681) never took a multivitamin. Those 293 remaining patients led researchers to estimate that patients who took a multivitamin at the start of the study were 19 percent more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer.
The aforementioned results may sound even more benign and incidental to you, considering another recent study that compared nearly 3,000 cases of breast cancer patients to a similar number of healthy female patients living in Wisconsin and found no association between breast cancer and multivitamin use.
This is probably a good time to remind you that taking a supplement is typically a good sign you're making more right choices for your health than wrong ones, like being more active and eating the right foods.
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Public Health Nutrition December 3, 2009
Yahoo News March 29, 2010
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition March 24, 2010
CancerConsultants.com